Harshing your mellow since 9/01

Category: Near-Naked Propaganda

The slant from the liberal media, Old Media, mainstream media, whatever you want to call it; it’s dishonest, it’s biased, it’s propaganda, it’s anti-American and anti-freedom, and you know it as well as I do

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said on Tuesday that President Donald Trump should “close down the White House press briefing room.”

“I am personally offended by the American news media. I think it is destructive and disgusting. It is a danger to the country right now,” Gingrich said. He also said the press should be banished to a nearby Starbucks and that Spicer should take questions from the American people. “Just say to the American people, you get to choose,” Gingrich said.

Closing the press briefing room would send a message to the country “that the media is a corrupt institution and he is tired of being harassed by people whose only interest is making him look bad.”

I don’t expect him to—it’s probably a bridge too far at this early stage—but GOD, I wish he would. Kick the lying propagandists to the curb, Donald. Go ahead. Just do it.

His view reflects a broader take from the administration and from Trump, who often rages about his news media coverage and has proposed ending the daily White House briefings. Steve Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, has called the media “the opposition party.”

Which of course they are. Currently, there are three of them, in truth. And one way or another, they all need to be broken to the will of the people, firmly and fully. Removing the treasonous liberal media’s perks, privileges, and access would be one hell of a good start; if Trump is still laboring under the illusion that he can somehow win these vile insects over—or that that’s an effort worth making in the first place—well, he needs to get over it.

But does it get better, you ask? Why, yes; yes, it surely does.

The former speaker, who said he was traveling in Ukraine, was infuriated by recent coverage of Trump’s alleged disclosures to the Russian foreign minister of classified intelligence that was reportedly obtained from Israel and the firing of the FBI director. Gingrich said that the president has a right “to declassify anything he wants to,” and that presidents for centuries have disclosed sensitive information in chats with foreign officials. He also said that reporters shouldn’t print information they couldn’t attach a name to.

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

Translation: “…according to current and former U.S. officials”=Obama sleepers who haven’t been rooted out and dispensed with yet—but badly need to be. As for “highly classified”: as President, Trump is the ultimate arbiter of what is classified and what is not. Yes, there is procedure for that, and no, Trump appears not to have followed it here. But let’s have a look at what “highly classified” material the Great Orange Boob Who Is Not Really President stupidly revealed in his stupid orange stupid boobness:

One day after dismissing Comey, Trump welcomed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — a key figure in earlier Russia controversies — into the Oval Office. It was during that meeting, officials said, that Trump went off script and began describing details of an Islamic State terrorist threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.

Oh. So he was sharing pertinent, actionable, and time-sensitive information with the Russkies, WITHOUT REVEALING SOURCES OR METHODS, in hopes of enlisting their help in fighting the jihadist filth—information that most of us could have easily guessed at, and have long anticipated.

UNFORGIVABLE! IMPEACH THIS RUTHLESS DICTATOR NOW!!!

For almost anyone in government, discussing such matters with an adversary would be illegal. As president, Trump has broad authority to declassify government secrets, making it unlikely that his disclosures broke the law.

Aw, gee, so sad for ya; brought up a little bit short there again, eh? Par for the course, and in keeping with every fizzled stinkbomb the Progtards have launched at Trump so far, there’s just no there there.

Better luck next time, losers. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of assholes, if you ask me.

White House officials involved in the meeting said Trump discussed only shared concerns about terrorism.

Which, y’know, is the truth. I’ve been saying it from the beginning: whatever differences we may have with Russia, an alliance with them to crush jihadist terrorism once and for all has great potential, and may indeed end up being our only realistic path to true victory.

So naturally the libtards are going to scream about it loud and long; it discomfits them on more levels than anyone can possibly keep up with. Can anybody really wonder about their rapid descent into complete, very public madness? Their entire universe has been turned upside down, their carefully nurtured and unrealistic worldview exposed as a hollow joke. Unfortunately for them, Bill has the right of it:

Two of the three US officials who attended the meeting (other than Trump himself) have branded this fairy tale (sourced to “former officials of the intelligence community” i.e. Obama mouth-puppets) as “untrue,” which is diplo-speak for “filthy lie.”

Predictably, even FOX News, not to mention every Democrat Fake News outlet, is waving wet panties from every flagpole in sight over it.

I don’t care.

This whole Trump Derangement Syndrome noise machine is, at least for me, finally subsiding into little more than a dull and inchoate roar slowly fading away in the background. Apparently there will be a new TDS hair-on-fire moment every three days or so for the next seven years of Trump’s presidency.

Bingo. As they descend further into a morass of self-thwarting folly, we should all continue to be diligent about mocking them, scorning them, humiliating them, dismissing them at every turn.

But there is a serious side to all the hilarity, and in our merriment we shouldn’t lose sight of that either. The patriotic, Constitution-revering, all-American Left has one goal, and one goal only: to de facto overturn the results of the last election by any means they can contrive. Elections they don’t win, you see, don’t count, and are to be considered illegitimate. Any means, any means at all, by which they can ignore the will of the people as expressed at the ballot box and hold onto power are perfectly fair.

What blows my mind is how long it’s taken some of us to realize what they really are. But the mask is fully off now; at this point, they couldn’t hide it if they wanted to. Trump has helped greatly with nudging that process along, pushing the Progtards over the cliff of lunacy they were so long a-building, and I can’t see that as anything but a very positive development indeed. Our hope at this point must be that he didn’t come along too late.

And I’ll add this thought: the next Democrat Socialist president ought to have impeachment proceedings logged against him, her, or it precisely five minutes after taking the oath of office. There ought to be multiple investigations, special prosecutors, and High Inquisitor proceedings launched against him, her, or it the very moment the election results are in, and they ought to be vigorously pursued every single second he, she, or it remains in office. That ought to confirm once and for all whether the Republicans are truly serious about winning, or whether they’re no more than a pasty illusion of opposition themselves.

Disney and Netflix officials said Friday they’re not sure why references to chromosomes and gender were removed from a 21-year-old episode of “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” which is available now for online streaming.

The 1996 episode, “Probability,” originally featured a cast member saying, “I’m a girl. Could have just as easily been a boy, though, because the probability of becoming a girl is always 1 in 2.”

“See, inside each of our cells are these things called chromosomes, and they control whether we become a boy or a girl,” she added. “See, there are only two possibilities: XX, a girl, or XY, a boy.”

That segment has since been removed, and it is not available in the version that is now streaming on Netflix, the Washington Free Beacon was first to report.

Nye’s new program, “Bill Nye Saves the World,” which is exclusive to Netflix, departs from his old television show’s position on gender.

“Gender is like sex, it’s on the spectrum,” Nye said in one of his newer episodes.

News that Nye’s old television program has been edited for Netflix comes on the heels of the premiere of his new online show, which takes a very progressive approach to a number of issues, including climate change, world population and gender.

Well, nothing says “science” more than hiding the facts to fit whatever political narrative is currently popular and maintain the approval of your fellow Progressivists, right?

Hey, balance the ball on your nose now, Science Guy, and clap your flippers together; maybe the libtards will throw you another fish. MJ has a couple of pertinently impertinent questions:

If y’all can forgive my recent lapse into pessimism, well, I’ll try to make it up to you.

Most voters don’t trust political polls and tend to think pollsters are out to stop President Trump’s agenda.

Uhh. Ummm, uhhh, yeah. Do I even need to add the obligatory “duh!!” here?

Just 26% of Likely U.S. Voters say they trust most political polls. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 55% do not trust most political polls.

Just one-out-of-three voters (35%) believe most pollsters are interested in reporting the attitudes of Americans in an unbiased manner when they poll on Trump. Forty-three percent (43%) think most pollsters are trying to block the president from passing his agenda. Just 12% say most are trying to help the president pass that agenda instead.

Really? REALLY? Just who in the farging fucking blue-balled hell is in that twelve percent, anyway? And how do they manage to feed themselves without full-time federal assistance?

Not surprisingly, given how wrong most pollsters were about the outcome of the presidential election, 64% of Republicans think most pollsters are trying to block Trump’s agenda, a view shared by 42% of unaffiliated voters but only 24% of Democrats.

That bolded part is on me, and is something I try to remind myself of each and every day. So should you; so should we all, lest we weaken in the face of the Left’s unceasing propaganda. Onwards.

Some election analysts suggested last year that Trump had hidden support among voters who were unwilling to say publicly where they stood because they were fearful of criticism.

Yeah, “criticism.” Or, y’know, violent, masked Progtards camped out on their front lawn with torches, threatening to burn their houses down and beat them, their wives, and their children to a greasy pulp.

I’ve always said polls are bunk; I took statistics in college, and the first thing they drummed into our heads was that polls can be manipulated to say anything the pollster wants, with plenty of classroom examples of how easy it was to do just that. So take all this with a grain of salt; as this very article admits, most pollsters—along with everydamnedbody else—completely missed the Trump Train’s arrival, and still don’t get why so many of us jumped aboard. Infallible they ain’t, to say the very least.

That caveat acknowledged, my gut feeling is that these numbers are probably pretty close to accurate. I think there are way more of us still willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, and trust him more than the usual Powers That Be suspects to put America’s best interests first. We’ll need to press him now and then, of course; there’s no realistic reason to expect him to be right every single time. But I do believe we’re some distance yet from abandoning all hope, battening the hatches, hunkering down, and loading magazines with the intention of imminently emptying them. Or so I hope, anyway.

“Girl, 12, forced to withdraw from chess tournament for wearing ‘seductive’ dress” is the headline. Now I’ll show you a pic of the dress, so you can see for yourself how “seductive” it may or may not be:

And now I’ll give you the link to the story revealing where this happened, and what “religion” is involved, so you can decide for yourself whether the savages who profess it are indeed ready to come out of the dark, dank caves (figurative AND literal) imposed on them by their 10th century “morality” and into the light of the 21st century–or whether they should be shunned, isolated, and avoided like the plague they are by Westerners who are truly (ahem) “woke” to their intractable degeneracy.

But hey, I’m sure you knew that already. While we’re at it, I’ll also note that not once—not ONCE—is this “religion” mentioned in the NYT story. But then, that could hardly be much of a surprise to anybody either, right?

Of course they are. They intend to hogtie the Trump admin so it can’t enact the agenda it was elected to enact, they figure taking a few scalps will do it for them, and so they’re gonna do their level best to get themselves one.

“He was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing,” Spicer said. “He brought them into the Holocaust centers, I understand that. But (not) in the way that Bashar al-Assad used them where he went into towns, dropped them down, into the middle of towns.”

We believe Holocaust centers refers to concentration camps.

That’s because it’s, y’know, obviously fucking true. And is exactly the same sort of well-intentioned misstatement the Libmedia never ONCE called Obama similarly on. But then, they never bothered to call him on his blatant lies, either, instead going out of their way to help cover them up.

As for the rest of Spicer’s statement, there is a reason Nazis and Hitler became synonymous with the term gas chamber. That’s because they pumped hydrogen cyanide gas into the killing rooms packed with Jews, Roma, and others singled out for extermination by Nazi leaders. At concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Sachsenhausen, Jews were taken from cattle cars and forced into “showers,” where guards released the gas. At the height of deportations, an estimated 6,000 Jews died each day in the Auschwitz gas chambers.

Spicer appears to be trying to limit his definition of chemical weapons to those dropped from planes or fired through cannons, as Assad has been alleged to have done. That sells short the definition in the Chemical Weapons Convention, which took force in 1997.

Here’s the convention’s definition:

And then the serious pretzeling begins:

The Nazis’ hydrogen cyanide meets the first condition and the gas chambers would qualify as a “device” in the second.

There is no mention that chemical weapons are only those used on the battlefield.

But even these guys have to finally admit a little something:

For what it’s worth, the consensus view is that Hitler did not use chemical weapons in battle.

Which is because he, y’know, didn’t. But guess what rating Politi”fact” gave Spicer’s statement anyway on their little libtard “Truth” O Meter. Go on, guess.

Why, “Pants On Fire,” natch. Here’s the actual quote again:

He was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing,” Spicer said. “He brought them into the Holocaust centers, I understand that. But (not) in the way that Bashar al-Assad used them where he went into towns, dropped them down, into the middle of towns.

And that is, in truth, one hundred percent, completely correct, true, and accurate. No reasonable or sane person could possibly quibble with it. It is a plain, simple statement of historical fact, a distinction even the dimmest among us could easily make.

And it earns him a “Pants On Fire” from these Jurassic Media clowns anyway.

Now go ahead and tell me again all about how they aren’t biased, whydon’tcha. And then you can tell me how they aren’t going after the Trump admin absolutely hammer and tongs, in a way they would never have dreamed of doing with Obama…or Hillary.

One can only sit back and admire the balls on these shitweasels. Purest brass, they are, and bigger than Big Ben’s bells.

A couple of headlines gleaned from the shrieking on the morning “news” shows today:

Vicious warmongering tyrant Trump acts in accord with his Russian masters’ wishes by launching the exact same sort of limited military action against Russia’s close ally as his predecessor did, in response to Assad’s use of Saddam’s chemical weapons against his own people!

And:

Republicans destroy Senate forever by implementing the Reid Option in an UNPRECEDENTED assault against our beloved Constitution, which doesn’t mention the filibuster even once!

I swear, if it wasn’t for hysterical lies, propaganda, and bullshit of the purest ray serene, they’d have absolutely nothing whatever to say. One day soon, look for them to deny Assad ever had WMDs at all—which maneuver ought to give off a very familiar stench. But has anybody noticed how truly difficult it’s become for them to twist things around to suit The Agenda now?

Update! I only just noticed the new slogan on the splash-ad for CBS’s morning show: “CBS This Morning: REAL news.” Almost all of which is fake news, natch, in keeping with the long Progressivist tradition of sowing chaos and uncertainty by pretzeling the language until words mean the exact opposite of what they once did.

About all any sane person can do at this point is just shake their head and laugh at them in ironic and rueful admiration.

The theory that Russia won the November election for Donald Trump through some vague meddling, so dominates cable news right now that it is worth summing up exactly what we know and what we do not know about that story. As of today, there is no evidence that the Russian government tampered with voting machines or hacked any votes in November. There’s no evidence that the Russians collaborated with Donald Trump or his campaign to win the election.

There is no evidence that Russian propaganda swung a single vote away from Hillary Clinton.

There is in other words no reason to believe that Russia changed the course of American political history.

Complaints from NBC about election meddling? Given that company’s conduct over the past six months that is a bit rich.

Consider the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape. Now, if you are living in America last fall, you certainly remember it. The shocking and vulgar remarks. The immediate and disastrous effect that tape had on the candidate Trump’s poll numbers. It was a political bomb detonated in the final days of the most intense political race of our lifetimes.

The fallout was so overwhelming that few paused to consider where that tape came from.

So, let’s consider that now. That tape belonged to NBC, it was shot by NBC cameramen for an NBC show on NBC property.

So, how did it wind up in the hands of “The Washington Post” which broke the story? How, in other words, did valuable intellectual property from one news organization end up benefitting a competitor.

Intentionally. That is the short answer.

According to sources at NBC, “The Access Hollywood” tape was leaked to “The Washington Post” with the full knowledge of NBC brass. That would include news edition head Andrew Lack.

NBC’s motive? To derail the Trump campaign two days before a presidential debate. Now, keep in mind that the “Access Hollywood” tape had been sitting in an archive since it was shot 11 years before.

Now, if you’re a news organization and someone stole the story of the year out of your office, wouldn’t you want know how that happened? You’d think you would. And yet, as far as we can tell, NBC News has never conducted a meaningful internal investigation into how that tape wound up at “The Washington Post.” That’s because they already knew the identity of the leaker. It was them!

Just standard practice in the highly “ethical” world of liberal “journalism.” This is how they do it, folks, and how they’ve always done it—or at least since the 60s, if not a hell of a lot longer. Skullduggery, collusion, manipulation, and barely-veiled deceit: anything and everything they think they can get away with to advance the Progressivist agenda, they’re not just willing to countenance but all in for it. Too bad for them that it’s a lot harder to get away with it these days than it used to be.

With all that in mind, Carlson’s closing question seems kind of gratuitous, if not almost fantastically naive:

Just because NBC’s effort failed and Donald Trump won anyway doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. NBC News lied to the public to help destroy a politician they didn’t like. We know that. We know they wouldn’t do it again, do we?

Do we know they’re not doing it now? Unfortunately we do not know that.

On the contrary, we know damned well they are, and will go right on doing it too—no matter how much damage it does to their ratings, their reputations, or the amount of trust (or interest) people have in them…all of which are steadily dwindling, and have been for years.

And anybody who thinks it’s only NBC simply hasn’t been paying attention.

President Donald Trump’s job approval rating stands at just 44 percent — a record low for a newly inaugurated commander-in-chief — and half of Americans say that his early challenges suggest unique and systemic problems with his administration, according to a new poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal.

Leaving aside for the nonce that, since the LibMedia’s phony polls have been consistently, unceasingly, hilariously wrong about Trump since the day he announced he was running, there’s absolutely no reason to start paying them any mind now, watch the fun as Jazz Shaw pulls these creaky old bones apart:

Wow. That’s pretty bad. But there were a lot of portions of that survey which didn’t receive any mention. I started browsing through them last night and was quickly reminded of a quote which is often (though perhaps incorrectly) attributed to Winston Churchill, stating that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. The NBC poll didn’t just ask about the nation’s feelings toward Donald Trump. They covered a number of other powerful figures in Washington DC as well. How did they fare? Let’s take a look.

Before getting to the individuals cited on the above list I’ll mention one figure which didn’t appear in that summary. That’s the approval rating for Congress as a whole. Trump is the figurehead of the executive branch, while Congress is the legislative branch. The approval rating for the combined House and Senate stands at 29/60. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise because for a very long time now Congress has enjoyed rankings which are perhaps only slightly higher than that of Charles Manson. Still, if President Trump can take consolation from anything it’s the fact that the White House is still more popular by a margin of double digits. Also of interest is the “Right Track / Wrong Track” number. Last September it stood at 30/62. This month it’s at 40/51. Not stellar, but at least heading in the right direction.

How about the political parties themselves? The Republicans, sitting at 32/60, are about as welcome as ants at a picnic. In fact, you couldn’t be much less popular than the GOP unless you happen to be… Democrats. They managed to slide in at 31/58.

In terms of the individual power players inside the Beltway, Donald Trump might be able to find at least a small bit of “good news” when the mirror is held up to other influential figures. In the House of Representatives, Speaker Paul Ryan might be feeling rather glum about his 34% approval mark which is even worse than Trump’s. The only thing which might cheer him up a bit is to see that his colleague Nancy Pelosi is sitting at 19. Over on the Senate side, Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer are nearly in a dead heat racing for the bottom with rankings in the low to mid teens.

It’s at least somewhat interesting that you rarely hear any of these other numbers discussed on cable news or written about at any length in the nation’s major newspapers. Bad news for Donald Trump is a headline. Bad news for other government leaders (particularly Democrats) seems to be of far less interest.

But hey, I don’t want to spoil the party for the mainstream media. You just keep on talking about how unpopular Donald Trump is. That should boost your ratings one of these days.

Yeah. After all, nobody can be this ludicrously ass-backwards and wrong forever, right? Sooner or later, they’ve got to come to their senses and start just reporting the news instead of always trying to manipulate it to further their own political ends, right?

President Trump announced Saturday he will not be attending this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, a break with past presidents.

“I will not be attending the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner this year. Please wish everyone well and have a great evening!” Trump tweeted.

The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), which organizes the annual dinner, said in a statement the event will continue as planned on April 29 despite Trump’s absence.

WHCA president Jeff Mason said the dinner “has been and will continue to be a celebration of the First Amendment and the important role played by an independent news media in a healthy republic.”

Pure claptrap. Propagandist Prom is a smarmy self-celebration of a bunch of narcissistic, over-entitled liberal assholes wherein they preen, strut, and launch cheap verbal assaults at any Republican President lacking enough in self-respect to attend, and obsequiously fellate the Democrat Socialist ones. Nothing less, and certainly nothing more. The sad spectacle of past Republican Presidents subjecting themselves to it year after year has been one of the most sick-making and incomprehensible mysteries I can think of.

Trump attended the dinner in 2011, where he was repeatedly mocked and teased by then-President Obama. Trump chose to skip the dinner during the 2016 presidential campaign, despite receiving a number of invites from the media.

“I love the First Amendment; nobody loves it better than me. Nobody,” Trump said Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“But as you saw throughout the entire campaign, and even now, the fake news doesn’t tell the truth,” he continued. “I say it doesn’t represent the people, it never will represent the people, and we’re going to do something about it.”

Good; it’s about damned time. Boot them the hell out of the White House press room and off of AF One; cut them off, call them out, kick them to the curb. Treat them as exactly what they are: dishonest, untrustworthy, über-egotistical left-wing parasites bereft of even the smallest shred of integrity. Let them hold all the dinners they like where they pat themselves on the back for their “courage” and “ethics” and supposed enlightenment. They’re no longer relevant to anyone but themselves and their fellow-travelers; dunk them into that reality and hold their heads under until they choke and drown on it.

Just a few hours after Trump warned during his CPAC speech that “we’re gonna do something about the media”, he did just that after the White House barred a number of news outlets from covering Sean Spicer’s Q&A session on Friday afternoon. Spicer decided to hold an off-camera “gaggle” with reporters inside his West Wing office instead of the traditional on-camera briefing in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room according to press reports.

Among the outlets not permitted to cover the gaggle were various news organizations that Trump has singled out in the past including CNN, The NYT, The Hill, Politico, BuzzFeed, the Daily Mail, BBC, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Daily News.

Several non mainstream outlets were allowed into Spicer’s office, including Breitbart, the Washington Times and One America News Network. Several other major news organizations were also let in to cover the gaggle. That group included ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, Reuters and Bloomberg, however AP and Time have boycotted the event.

The White House Correspondents’ Association sharply criticized the decision.

Whine all you want, you miserable tapeworms. See what it gets ya. And while you’re at it, go take a flying fuck at a plate-glass window, too. Via Vox, who says:

Good. Now let him revoke their press credentials. As Glenn Reynolds says, all they are is activists with a byline. They’re not neutral. So treat them like the damned enemy they are.

Now is the time to act. Now is not the time to play fair. Let them whine and cry. What are they going to do, call Trump a Nazi racist bigot again?

Precisely so. It’s the very lesson the cucks and perennial GOPe losers like McCain never could learn. And now the tables are turned, and the smug super-geniuses have a lesson of their own to learn…about the perils of underestimating The Donald.

It wasn’t a press conference – it was a kinky dungeon session where masochistic journalists eagerly sought out the delicious pain Master T was dealing. Hack after hack stepped up, tried to play “gotcha,” and ended up whimpering in the fetal position. The best part was CNN’s Jim Acosta, fresh from whining about how conservative outlets now get to ask questions too, basically handing Trump the cat-o-nine tails. Dude, next time keep from talking yourself into more public humiliation by biting down on the ball gag.

The media’s safe word is “Objectivity,” but none of them uttered it.

The wonderful thing about Trump – and the thing that sets the Fredocons and wusspublicans fussing – is that he gives exactly zero damns about the media’s inflated and ridiculous self-image. He doesn’t pay lip service to their lie that they are anything but what Instapundit calls “Democratic Party operatives with bylines.” Trump called them “the enemy of the American People,” to which normals responded with “Yeah, sounds about right.”

Trump sees them as the enemy, which they are, and he calls them what they are, just like he calls radical Islamic terrorists “radical Islamic terrorists” instead of generic “extremists” who shout “Allah Akbar!” as they commit acts of “workplace violence” whose motives remain elusive and unknowable. It would be ironic that the media hates it when a politician tells the truth, except no one still believes the media is in the truth business.

Only a fevered hive mind, poisoned by unearned self-regard and a delusional sense of its own moral superiority, could seriously equate a politician pointing out the obvious fact that today’s reporters are mostly lying, incompetent jerks with Hitlerian press censorship. Tell you what – I’ll believe you when the National Guard shows up to shut down CNN by padlocking the makeup room.

Then there’s the Russians/Flynn nonsense, a non-story that America non-cares about. Oh, there’s a real story there, but the press isn’t interested in that. Here’s the real story – the intelligence community under the Obama administration was obviously eavesdropping on Trump’s campaign in violation of practically every law ever written. Whether it was direct tapping of phones and emails, or illegally accessing the communications swooped up by the NSA in its nets, it’s clear that Obama’s people were spying on Obama’s political opponents. The transcript excerpts of Flynn’s phone call with the Russian diplomat leaked because it could be played off as targeting the Russian, though this was still an outrageous disclosure of American spying capabilities. What these criminals can’t do is release the communications between Americans that they possess because doing that confirms what we all know – that Obama’s people spied on his political opponents like his IRS persecuted them. The only question really is what did Obama know, and when did he know it – interestingly, on his way out the door, Obama made it easy to hide the source of the leaks by opening up access to the information across a bunch of agencies. There’s your story, a scandal that makes Watergate seem microscopic, and the mainstream media will not touch it because it would destroy the media’s political allies.

The New York Times recently published an article that was, at best a poorly done hit piece; or, at worst, a poorly done piece that gives us insight into the paper’s view of the dangers of uncurated knowledge.

Do they ever publish anything that isn’t these days? It’s actually a good post, though; read on for the sad details, in case you thought there was still any reason to bother with the wheezing old DNC house-propaganda organ at all.

It is difficult to adequately sum up the breadth of this epidemic, chiefly because it keeps growing: day after day, even hour after hour, the media continue to broadcast, spread, promulgate, publicize, and promote fake news on an industrial scale. It has become a regular part of our news cycle, not distinct from or extraneous to it but a part of it, embedded within the news apparatus as a spoke is embedded in a bicycle wheel.

A part of it? You’re being too kind, buddy; it’s pretty much all of it.

How we will get out of this is anyone’s guess. We might not get out of it, not so long as Trump is president of these United States. We may be up for four—maybe eight!—long years of authentic fake news media hysteria. It is worth cataloging at least a small sampling of the hysteria so far. Only when we fully assess the extent of the media’s collapse into ignominious ineptitude can we truly begin to reckon with it.

Two mistakes there: one, instead of saying “as long as Trump is etc,” you could have said “as long as anyone not a dyed-in-the-wool, hardcore, Red in tooth and claw Leftist” etc. Two, it isn’t ineptitude; that at least implies good intentions hamstrung by mere incompetence. It’s no such thing; it’s manipulation, plain and simple. It’s no kind of honest mistake; it’s on purpose, done with malicious intent, and the fact that they’re fooling no one but themselves by now entitles them to nothing at all in the way of either sympathy or indulgence for them.

Follows, a by-no-means-comprehensive list of some of the more egregious lies told by these duplicitous muttonheads. Yes, there will be plenty more a-coming. In sum:

But all of them, taken as a group, raise a pressing and important question: why is this happening? Why are our media so regularly and so profoundly debasing and beclowning themselves, lying to the public and sullying our national discourse—sometimes on a daily basis? How has it come to this point?

Perhaps the answer is: “We’ve let it.” The media will not stop behaving in so reckless a manner unless and until we demand they stop.

Actually, the answer is more like “because they’ve gotten away with it for decades and expected they always would.” Tragically for them, we can now fact-check their asses…and do.

Which in the end, although it will be their ultimate undoing, won’t matter much; they’ll go right on diligently propagandizing until the last Jurassic Media outlet is shuttered for good. They were dedicated; they’re now committed, and as individuals, they have way too much of their own personal identities wrapped up in said propagandizing to turn back now. The writing was on the wall back when Newsweek got sold for a dollar. They failed to see it then, and they remain oblivious to it now.

Well, you have certainly had one heck of year, haven’t you? I can’t imagine how it must feel to be you right now. This time last year you were yucking it up with your buddies in the White House about how Obama was going to ram through as many executive actions as he could to push the immigration debate into the ‘win’ category. How’d that work out for you? From there you went right into a National Lampoon-style daily snark against the guy you said didn’t stand a chance of winning and that went even better, right up until November 8th.

The looks on your faces that night were almost worth the past fifty years of your constant obfuscation and perfidy. It was a real-time version of the folks riding First Class on the Titanic realizing that their tuxedoes weren’t buying them a whole lot of sympathy down at the lifeboat boarding station. Stricken is the word that comes to mind. To call what the public delivered to you an ass-whooping would be an understatement. You guys looked like a collectivist version of Ronda Rousey after Holly Holm got done with her. Beaten, down for the count and weepy in the morning.

So why bother trying to keep up with the pretenses? In the grocery business, they’d say you were past your sell by date. There was a time when you had not only a purpose, but a mandate and those must have been heady days indeed, the gravitas and respect measured out in equal parts from every quarter of America. I remember well the way my own Grandparents would hang on every word uttered by the distinguished clergy of the time; Huntley, Brinkley and Cronkite.

If there had been room on the walls their portraits would have hung beside the ones of JFK and FDR, so admired were they for their earnest and judicious reporting on the comings and goings of our political leaders and the events of the day. Later, guys like Woodward and Bernstein turned themselves into nerdy Batmen, flipping the script on the powerful and turning up the pressure until their only recourse was to clamber on a helicopter and wave grimly not only to the public but any legacy that may have been hoped for. Good times, indeed.

But then something happened.

Did it ever. I can’t think of a better descriptive summary of their MO than “obfuscation and perfidy.” Nailed it, he did, clean and tight.

The media will tell any lie about Trump. It starts every day by accusing him of a dozen different things. And it ends every day by accusing him of a dozen others. It has no standards and no ethics. When one lie, such as the claim that Trump had banished the bust of Martin Luther King, falls apart, they roll out another one. Then they inflate the lie they just told by reporting on it as if it were an actual event. It’s time to get the press out and restore the White House indoor swimming pool to its original function. The press can remain in it if they don’t mind wet clothes, moldy laptops and ruined cameras.

When we talk about the media, we really mean the representatives of a handful of corporations who are in the business of advocating for the left and attacking the right. There is no journalism involved in all this: only opposition research. The distinction between the media and the political left no longer exists.

There is no reason to embed a voice of the political opposition in the White House whose only function is using the press briefings as platforms for their smears. Nor is there any reason to provide special status to a handful of corporate left-wing operatives while leaving out the rest of the spectrum.

The White House press corps is an outmoded institution. There’s no need to crowd a small number of media elites into a limited space. Or any space at all. We live in a world of instantaneous communications. Every smartphone is capable of doing more than the laptops that reporters were laboring over in the Clinton years. Any of the men and women in that room can email or text their questions. The briefings serve no useful function except as political theater by a privileged class.

President Trump has vowed to drain the swamp. A good place to start is the smarmy swamp of privilege over the White House indoor pool.

The really nice thing is, nobody but nobody believes them anymore. They’re still operating from the same old outdated playbook, as if it was still 1980 and they were still the gatekeepers of all information. As if we all had nowhere else to go but their tired, creaking, failing broadcast networks, newspapers, and dead-tree magazines for news of the events of the day.

But they aren’t the gatekeepers anymore; we have a multiplicity of information sources now, and, as the old saying goes, we can fact check their asses. Can, and DO. They’re still standing guard over the rubble, but thanks to the internet, the gates are in ruins, a smoking, twisted mess. They’re doggedly protecting something we bypassed long ago, and they’re doing so not out of faithfulness and innocent belief, but out of stupidity, stubbornness, and ineffectual, hapless guile.

They don’t even seem to know how far behind we’ve left them. Worse, they’re in denial about it, refusing to acknowledge the ground shifting under their feet, even as the earthquake knocks them over like tenpins. Worse, that is, for them, not us.

They are no longer honest brokers of information, if indeed they ever were; looking back at, for instance, Cronkite’s greasy defeatism regarding Tet—he was in some small measure responsible for literally millions of deaths because of his blinkered cluelessness, although to his credit he did admit in his commentary that he was being “speculative, personal, [and] subjective,” a confession we’d never get from today’s propagandists—it’s kind of hard to think that they were.

Regardless, they now stand revealed as nothing more than duplicitous propagandists, manipulative and false to their very marrow. And there’s no going back. They have an agenda to advance, and by the very act of abandoning their journalistic integrity (OXYMORON ALERT!) in favor of attempting to advance it, they have lost the means to do so. Of all the beautiful ironies of this past election year, that one might be the most exquisite. Who says there’s no justice in this world, anyway?

Contrary to their outraged opinion, it wasn’t even Trump that broke them, although his complete disdain for them certainly put the crowning touch on their ruination, and they’ll blame him for it from now on. They brought themselves down, by betraying the very concept of what journalism was supposed to be.

And it worked out just as well for them this time as it has for the last year or more, too. Only this time, the Deep State, in the form of the CIA, was fully involved. Bill has the best quick-and-dirty summary out there:

So, the Deep State and its allies in the NeverTrump and Leftist media went to war with President Trump a few days ago, by releasing a pack of lies masquerading as news, and then playing it up for all it was worth (to them) – intrinsically, however, it was worthless.

This attack on Trump mirrors another attack launched at the last minute on George W. Bush – in this case, records of his drunk driving conviction were leaked in order to aid Al Gore’s campaign. Bush survived that one, barely, but it was an example of the sort of tried and true methods the left and its Deep State allies have always used, generally successfully.

That ended yesterday, I expect.

Let’s go to the tape:

1. An extremely weird cabal of NeverTrumptard Senator John “Senile” McCain, Rick “Bottom Feeder” Wilson, some Brit Clinton oppo figure, and various Deep State unknowns in the intel “community” (community is another name for “gang,” in this case), conspired to create, float, and transmit a pack of lies about Donald Trump hiring prostitutes to piss in a bed the Obamas had once slept in, because Trump hated Obama so much. Also, that one of his chief lieutenants had been involved in some sort of corrupt shenanigans several years ago in Prague, which laid Trump open to Russian blackmail.

2. Once this story floated to the surface like a bouyant turdball, pushed up by a “pile of garbage” leftwing blog called Buzzfeed, a host of “legitimate” news cites like CNN, NYT, WaPo, and many others spouted thousands of words and dozens of column inches giving it heavy publicity. Some tried to cover themselves by claiming that while none of this had been actually verified, it was still worth covering because they weren’t covering it, they were covering Buzzfeed‘s coverage of it.

3. The media was looking forward in slavering anticipation to Trump’s upcoming presser, and stoked the frenzy even higher. Now, at last, they had the means to finally slay the Trump monster. They would hammer him with dozens of questions about this fake scandal, and reduce him to quivering jelly. Their lead paladin, apparently, would be CNN’s White House reporter Jim Acosta.

4. Trump crushed them.

He sure did—completely enough that the miserable worm Clapper felt obliged to release a groveling statement expressing his “profound dismay” at the attempt, and putting in a phone call to the God Emperor which I can easily and happily imagine the tenor of. The DC swamp needs draining way worse than some of us might have thought, and it’s a really, really big swamp, especially fetid and noxious. But, as Bill says:

This fiasco will rapidly fall down the media memory hole, but a part of it will be permanently imprinted on the press’ DNA: Don’t fuck with Trump. He bites back – hard.

Actually, I’d have to quibble with the idea that they learned anything at all from it. Why would they? They demonstrably haven’t learned a damned thing in nearly two years of this. And you can be assured that next week, they’ll be back with another desperate and feeble “OHHH, we REALLY got him now!” attempt at undermining him.

They’ve been coming out with this risible twaddle at the rate of about one every ten days or so, and every last one of them has blown up in their faces. Hey, anybody remember all those women supposedly “groped” and “assaulted” by Trump they were so merrily trotting out a few months back? Anybody heard anything from any of them lately? Even one of ’em?

Umm. Yeah.

Truth is, anybody who thought that getting us off the hot rails to liberal hell was going to be anything less than a full-time, all-out war was kidding themselves. They’ll be back, again and again and again. And every time they do, they’ll accomplish nothing more than solidifying Trump’s base of support, and guaranteeing their own humiliation and defeat. They will learn nothing from any of it. They seem incapable of it.

Now, you CF lifers may recollect a few years back when we had a pretty severe and ongoing dustup with Glenn Greenwald over…I don’t even remember what now. So hold onto your hats while I quote him, and admit that his take is pretty much right on the money, aside from the routine and facile slaps at Trump:

FOR MONTHS, THE CIA, with unprecedented clarity, overtly threw its weight behind Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and sought to defeat Donald Trump. In August, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell announced his endorsement of Clinton in the New York Times and claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” The CIA and NSA director under George W. Bush, Gen. Michael Hayden, also endorsed Clinton and went to the Washington Post to warn, in the week before the election, that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin,” adding that Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”

It is not hard to understand why the CIA preferred Clinton over Trump. Clinton was critical of Obama for restraining the CIA’s proxy war in Syria and was eager to expand that war, while Trump denounced it. Clinton clearly wanted a harder line than Obama took against the CIA’s long-standing foes in Moscow, while Trump wanted improved relations and greater cooperation. In general, Clinton defended and intended to extend the decades long international military order on which the CIA and Pentagon’s preeminence depends, while Trump — through a still-uncertain mix of instability and extremist conviction — posed a threat to it.

Whatever one’s views are on those debates, it is the democratic framework — the presidential election, the confirmation process, congressional leaders, judicial proceedings, citizen activism and protest, civil disobedience — that should determine how they are resolved. All of those policy disputes were debated out in the open; the public heard them; and Trump won. Nobody should crave the rule of Deep State overlords.

Yet craving Deep State rule is exactly what prominent Democratic operatives and media figures are doing.

Well, hey, as long as it’s their Deep State coup, what the heck. Right, guys?

Greenwald has more of the nuts and bolts of this pitifully inept smear job, as does Sundance. But in the end, the takeaway remains this: there are two things you can take to the bank, two assumptions that are always safe and will wind up justified. One: whenever somebody shoots up a mall or airport, blows up a building, or drives a truck into a crowded city street during a major public gathering, it’s going to be a Muslim behind it, upon which “discovery” the media will drop the whole story like a hot rock, never to mention it again, and Two: whenever you hear of another supposed “troubling” “scandal” involving Trump, it’s either going to be a big pile of nothing, or an outright lie, and will be exposed as such toot fucking sweet—whereupon Trump will lambast the Lying Media as they deserve, the libtards will wring their hands about “unprecedented” attacks on “honest journalists” and the First Amendment, and the rest of the country will stand up and cheer. I’ll let Rush lay that bit out for ya:

So the media has become accustomed to this technique of taking out political opponents with bilge like this working. But again they don’t know what they’re up against with Donald Trump. They think that the techniques that they’ve used for decades to destroy political opponents are gonna work on Trump, and they just don’t understand why they don’t work. They don’t understand the connection Trump’s voters have with him. They don’t understand connection of Trump’s supporters. They don’t believe that Trump actually won the election.

They’re living in a really deluded place, and they’re totally unhinged. So it was finally exposed to be fraudulent, and all these media people began to back off. Oh, by the way, Neil Cavuto had a brilliant point yesterday. Neil Cavuto of the Fox Business Network and Fox News Channel. Cavuto said… I’m paraphrasing, but he essentially… I’m paraphrasing. He essentially said to the media, “Hey, media, what’s it feel like to be attacked by a president? Hey, media, you never defended us at Fox when Obama came after us or Rush Limbaugh for the last eight years,” and he’s gotta great point.

Whenever Obama would trash Fox or trash me and talk radio, the Drive-Bys didn’t act like there was anything wrong. In fact, many of them piled on Fox News along with Obama. So now here’s Trump, and he’s not just trashing the media for the sake of it like Obama trashed Fox News; he’s trashing the media because they’re a bunch of frauds! He’s trashing the media because they are engaging in fake news and he’s calling ’em out on it! So Cavuto’s point was, “Hey, media, you never came to our defense when Obama was attacking us. So go sit in it. Find out what it’s like.

“You’re acting like this has never happened before. You’re acting like this is beyond the pale. Your buddy Obama spent eight years doing this kind of stuff to Fox News and to talk radio and to Rush Limbaugh, and you haven’t said a word in support. Now when Trump comes after you, you’re acting like all kinds of societal norms and traditions are being blown up.” Cavuto is exactly right about this. It’s such a good point that I wish I had thought of it.

They only have the one playbook. It’s out of date and no longer effective, and they don’t even realize it; they’re still trying to run a single-wing against a prevent defense, and now they’re being made to look very Pop Warner-league indeed. And that’s a good thing.

Three famous quotes from Wellington apply quite nicely here: “Publish and be damned.” “Wise people learn when they can; fools learn when they must.” And: “They came at us in the same old way, and we defeated them in the same old way.” That last one’s from Waterloo; there’s a lesson in there for the Napoleon media, but they will assuredly learn it only when they must…if ever.

As the Washington Post’s story of Russian hackers burrowed deep within the US electrical grid, ready to plunge the nation into darkness at the flip of a switch unraveled into the story of a single non-grid-connected laptop with a piece of malware on it, the Post has faced fierce criticism over how it fact checked and verified the details of its story. It turns out that the Post not only did not fact check the story until after it was published live on its website, but in its defense of the story, the Post made a number of false statements about what was written when, which the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine reveals.

Can anybody come up with a reason to even bother with Jurassic Media at all nowadays? I’d be interested to hear one, because I’m drawing a complete blank, myself. The annoyance that goes with the insult of being lied to so obviously just isn’t offset anymore by the mild amusement at their unceasing pathetic attempts to drive home a patently false Lefty narrative. If it ever was.

Of course, by the lights of today’s Main Stream Media and its editorial voices, a white Christian American is responsible – personally – for essentially all the troubles of the world. Lower than pond scum. Practically a Nazi. He has no right to his opinions; indeed, he should be punished for them. He must be made to cringe before his betters and humbly beg pardon for his sins. He should be grateful that they don’t relieve him of his life after they’ve stripped him of his rights and property.

But I mustn’t get off course. The despondent camp wants to bring something back, too: the America when the Left dominated all mass communications. The era when its pronouncements went unchallenged because there was no medium through which to challenge them.

The temper of the Left, particularly among the members of its media annex, is plain: they believe that to return to power, they must recapture their earlier dominance of mass communications. In this, the Left is almost certainly correct. It’s a thread that runs through more than just their whining. And as you can see from the links above, they clearly mean to do it.

The Left’s three most potent weapons are the entertainment industry, the educational institutions, and the so-called news media. If these can be neutralized, and a sufficiency of alternatives can be provided, the incoming Trump Administration will have a much better chance of carrying through on its agenda. But make no mistake: the Left will defend its bastions with total ferocity, while doing everything it can to delegitimize the alternatives the Internet, talk radio, and low-cost cablecasting have made possible.

They surely will. Which is one reason why Rush (and myself) are constantly saying that they must be not just defeated but crushed utterly if America That Was is ever to be resuscitated. More from James Kirkpatrick:

For example, Buzzfeed’s latest masterpiece of journalism: the shocking revelation that reality stars Chip and Joanna Gaines attend a church that disagrees with homosexual marriage. You know–like every Christian church for about 2000 years. The obvious agenda: to get the show canceled or the Gaines to disavow their own pastor.
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This is the goal of most “journalism” today–to get someone fired or to get someone to disavow someone. The Southern Poverty Law Center makes a lucrative income from policing speech. And journalists today are no different than the $PLC. They do not report, they do not provide information, and rather than ensuring freedom they are the willing tools of repression.

And this repression only goes one way.

If you wouldn’t invite some communist demonstrator into your meeting, why would you invite an MSM journalist? They have the same beliefs, the same motivations, and increasingly, they rely on the same tactics. Aside from the occasional throwing of feces (as Richard Spencer learned at NPI), the preferred tactic of “Antifa” consists of pearl-clutching blog posts.

Since the election, journalists have been paying tribute to their own courage, promising to hold Trump accountable. But there is no greater enemy to free speech than reporters. Shutting down the networks and shuttering the newspapers would be a boon to independence of thought, not an obstacle.

For his own sake, to defend his own Administration, Trump has to delegitimize the MSM, just as he did during the campaign. He should continue to use his Twitter account and speak straight to the people. He should not hold press conferences with national MSM and speak only to local reporters before holding rallies. If Twitter bans him, as Leftists are urging, he should nationalize it as a utility and make it a free speech zone.

And Trump’s supporters need to act the same way. Stop giving reporters access. Stop pretending you can play the MSM for your own benefit. Stop acting like these people are anything other than hostile political activists whose only interest in life is to make yours worse.

Stop giving them what they want.

Indeed. In fact, we must begin to aggressively take things away from them…starting with their cozy access to power via the White House Press Room. Shut it down, move ’em out; let them shout their inane and dishonest “gotcha” questions over the White House fence, where they can huddle in the January chill with the rest of the tourists. For as long as they continue to prefer being anti-American propagandists to being actual honest journalists, let them endure the kind of repression they’re always whining about when Republicans are in power but can never quite manage to notice when a commie baglapper like Obama is in power. The handful of intelligent people among ’em might figure things out eventually; to Hell forever with the rest.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.

This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’d be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.

So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited.

Gee, fancy that. And, seeing all that, you’ve all doubled down on the exact same smug assumption of superiority that got you Trump in the first place. Just wait till you guys see what THAT gets ya. I promise you won’t like it.

You’ll want to read all of this one. The denouement? This:

Our theme now should be humility. We must become more impartial, not less so. We have to abandon our easy culture of tantrums and recrimination. We have to stop writing these know-it-all, 140-character sermons on social media and admit that, as a class, journalists have a shamefully limited understanding of the country we cover.

What’s worse, we don’t make much of an effort to really understand, and with too few exceptions, treat the economic grievances of Middle America like they’re some sort of punchline.

Hard to believe that any of these precious, smarmy little schmucks are capable of this much honesty and sincere introspection, but, well, there it is. Hats off to the guy for that, at least.

“Trump started with [CNN chief] Jeff Zucker and said ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed,’ ” the source said.

“The meeting was a total disaster. The TV execs and anchors went in there thinking they would be discussing the access they would get to the Trump administration, but instead they got a Trump-style dressing down,” the source added.

A second source confirmed the fireworks.

“The meeting took place in a big board room and there were about 30 or 40 people, including the big news anchors from all the networks,” the other source said.

“Trump kept saying, ‘We’re in a room of liars, the deceitful dishonest media who got it all wrong.’ He addressed everyone in the room calling the media dishonest, deceitful liars. He called out Jeff Zucker by name and said everyone at CNN was a liar, and CNN was [a] network of liars,” the source said.

“Trump didn’t say [NBC reporter] Katy Tur by name, but talked about an NBC female correspondent who got it wrong, then he referred to a horrible network correspondent who cried when Hillary lost who hosted a debate – which was Martha Raddatz who was also in the room.”

The stunned reporters tried to get a word in edgewise to discuss access to a Trump Administration.

Access my ass. How’s this for access: no special privileges, no WH press room, no perks, not even so much as a cheap, broken-down coffee machine. Stand out on Pennsylvania Avenue with the rest of the tourists and try shouting your ill-intentioned gotcha questions over the fence. And until you swinish propagandists can rediscover what the words journalism and reporting are actually supposed to mean, it stays that way.

The lesson of Tuesday night for Democrats should have been the thought Rush Limbaugh left his listeners with just before he signed off on Election Day back in 2000: “Maybe there are fewer of us than I thought…” The people who think like Andrew Sullivan and Sally Kohn and Emma Watson and John Oliver and Lena Dunham are, if not few in number, concentrated in relatively few corners of a sprawling country: one third of the Democrats’ representation in the House now comes from just three states – New York, Massachusetts and California. That’s one reason why they’re calling for the abolition of the Electoral College.

But, absent the upending of the constitution, they have a problem.

John Oliver and Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah have sportingly decided, to judge from their ratings, to prioritize their politics over their comedy. But, whether or not “Love Trumps Hate”, condescension doesn’t trump anything. For a year-and-a-half they shoveled industrial-strength coastal sneering into the path of the Trump train on a scale that would have derailed any other candidate before he got to Iowa. Instead, Trump just bulldozed through it. If elite condescension failed to deny him the presidency, is it likely to be any more effective now that he is the president?

It’s been little short of amazing to see the liberal media continuing to try to entrap Trump with lies just as they have all along, even after as resounding a repudiation as they got on election day. They’re just skating along as if they’re unaware a historic landslide just took place in spite of their best efforts to forestall it. Can it be possible that they don’t actually realize that their manipulation and deceit is a huge part of why he won in the first place? Can anybody really be that stupid?

Trump refuses to play along by committing himself to accepting the results of a rigged election! Why, he’s undermining the very foundation of our corrupt illusion of democracy!

The very instant that Chris Wallace explained to Trump that both his running mate and his daughter had said they’d accept the results of the election, I knew that Trump was going to dive into the deep end. He simply can’t resist looking like the toughest man in the room, and if he can do it by showing Mike Pence who’s boss, then all the better. So he says the one thing guaranteed not just to send the media into a frenzy, he says something that everyone but his most die-hard supporters knows is absolutely cartoon-level crazy — that he’s going to keep us “in suspense.” Yet here’s the thing — you can be tough on vote fraud without jolting the American people. You can say, “Chris, I believe in upholding and protecting the laws of this nation, and that means respecting the integrity of the ballot box and the peaceful transition of power.” It’s that simple.

Yeah—because it’s incredibly crucially vital to respect the integrity of a ballot box that has been stripped of all integrity, to ensure a peaceful transition of power from the hard Left to the very slightly less hard Left.

Know who else had some thoughts on that?

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Shocking! Appalling! Horrifying! Who the hell could possibly approve of such violent, dangerous rhetoric? Whoever said such things is entirely, uhh, deplorable.

I hope not to hear one further peep from the Trump-hating milksops at NRO and elsewhere about liberal media bias, Democrat Socialist voter fraud, or Hillary’s reflexive dishonesty from here on out. If their weak knees prevent them from making the leap from whining about things to doing something about them—something besides helping to elect Her More-Of-The-Sameness, I mean—then they need to use their flapping yaps exclusively for devouring the crumbs tossed to them from the Big Table, and absolutely nothing else.

I repeat: if you believe the liberal bias that permeates our culture, our media, our entertainment, and our schools isn’t affecting our elections, then why waste time whining about it? And if you believe it IS doing harm, and HAS fundamentally transformed this nation into the direct antithesis of the kind of country the Founders envisioned, why on earth would you object to speaking forcefully about it, or limit your options when it comes to trying to effect real change?

The Founders laid their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor on the line, and not in a metaphorical way, either. The #NeverTrumpTard “conservative” media professionals are so comfortably spineless they’re collapsing onto the fainting couches over mere blunt talk about the problem. The Founders—rough men ready to do violence on liberty’s behalf—built a great nation on the bedrock of their commitment. What are the Professional “Conservatives” building?

Update! Watching the network morning shows as usual, and my God, the spin is simply unbelievable. It’s a veritable blizzard of unrelenting bullshit, and nothing whatsoever more; they really are pulling out all the stops for their candidate, in the most brazen and shameless way possible. If the American voter can’t see through this naked skullduggery and subterfuge—or, worse, does see through it and elects Hillary anyway—it richly deserves absolutely everything it’s going to get. Texas needs to prepare itself for some major migration from points of the compass other than the usual one in that worst-case scenario; there’ll be people refugeeing in from all over Hillary’s Amerika, I hereby predict.

Donald Trump bragged in vulgar terms about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women during a 2005 conversation caught on a hot microphone, saying that “when you’re a star, they let you do it,” according to a video obtained by The Washington Post.

The video captures Trump talking with Billy Bush, then of “Access Hollywood,” on a bus with the show’s name written across the side. They were arriving on the set of “Days of Our Lives” to tape a segment about Trump’s cameo on the soap opera.

“I did try and f— her. She was married,” Trump says.

“I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married,” Trump says. “Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.”

At that point in the audio, Trump and Bush appear to notice Arianne Zucker, the actress who is waiting to escort them into the soap-opera set.

“Your girl’s hot as s—, in the purple,” says Bush, who’s now a co-host of NBC’s “Today” show.

“Whoa!” Trump says. “Whoa!”

“I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her,” Trump says. “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.”

“And when you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”

“Whatever you want,” says another voice, apparently Bush’s.

“Grab them by the p—y,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”

My GOD, but I feel faint! Trump is guilty—GUILTY!—of talking like just about every other red-blooded American male not currently sporting a dress and trying to ooze his way into the little girl’s bathroom by claiming he “feels pretty”?!? UNCLE PETER, MY SMELLING SALTS!

If you’re the kind of student-council dweeb that isn’t aware that most men—most MEN, that is—routinely talk about getting some pussy, getting laid, taxing that ass, banging that box, chasing beaver—about tits, ass, legs, jugs, boobs, butts, the glories of tight pink nipples versus pepperonis or Crunchberries, then you have led a sheltered life indeed.

Here’s a clue for those still hiding behind mama’s skirts from the terror of OUTRAGES such as this: most of us are not going to be bothered in the least by any of this crap. The only problem we might conceivably have with it is a slight sheepish envy because of the essential truth in something he said: when you’re a star, they let you do it. He’s right, and every man Jack of us knows it. And we wish we were stars, so we could do it too.

No, the main problem we’re going to have, which is the same problem we’ve had all along that has led to the rise of Trump in the first place, is the willing cuckservative embrace of the terms of Leftist Feminaziism to comfort themselves as they splash about in their little puddle of sore-loser tears. You can wade through all of that you may like by clicking over to the Corner; they’re about hip deep and rising in it over there. “Shocking!” “Disgusting!” “Disrespect!” And the all-time prizewinner, “OBJECTIFICATION OF WOMEN!!!” The Left calls the tune, and these perennial-loser golem are so well-trained at this point they leap right up and start dancing to it. It’s now little more than reflex, and it’s truly pitiful to see.

Yeah, it might be indicative of some of our “baser impulses,” sure. It’s also very, very human. And it ain’t quite on a level with sending four good Americans out to be killed by savages, refusing to offer them support, and then lying about it. Not quite.

Here’s another news flash these Little Lord Fauntleroys seem to have missed: women do the exact same thing. How many of you have been told—by your wives, your girlfriends, your female friends, whoever—that “hoo boy, if you could hear how women talk among themselves, it would curl your hair!” If I’ve heard that once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. What the hell did you think it was in your girlfriend’s diary that ancient and established wisdom told you a bazillion times you should never, ever read, anyway? Women too, it seems, enjoy a bit of raunchy conversation now and then among their pals about cock, dick, prick, et al. Seven inches of steaming hot conga. About getting fucked good and hard and long by a willing, eager partner with stamina and energy. About getting stuffed, taking it all, anything you can imagine. I don’t have to tell you they really, really do this. It’s another one of those things we all already know.

But hey, a youthful exuberance for hot, dirty sex is Just Not Presidential, right? This surely renders Trump once and for all Unfit For Office, doesn’t it?

Well, only if you think JFK never once had a conversation like that. Hell, even that nebbish old prune Jimmy Carter did an interview with Playboy, I think it was, wherein he confessed to feeling “lust in his heart.” Leave it to Carter to suck all the fun right out of even good old locker-room dialogue*, leaving a dried out, juiceless, lifeless husk flapping in the breeze raised by his priggish, warmed-over sanctimony in its place. Doesn’t matter though; most of us ordinary folks know what he really meant.

Even George Washington probably indulged in the 18th-century equivalent himself. The man was a soldier, and spent a lot of his time hanging out with soldiers. And soldiers are soldiers, then or now; men who live in barracks don’t grow into plaster saints, you know. If you think they didn’t thoroughly enjoy speculating among themselves, in the most direct and descriptive terms, on what might be under all those petticoats and what they might like to do with it if they got the chance, you’re dreaming. As sainted cavalryman Jeb Stuart once said: a soldier who won’t fuck, won’t fight. Yes, he put it in exactly those terms, too.

Sorry, fellas, but this one ain’t gonna fly either, with anybody who has an ounce of joie de vivre left in ’em. Back to the drawing board again, and better luck next time.

Update! Further thoughts: the one thing, just about the only thing, that happens every time the establishment Ruling Class and its trained poodles in the media attempts another of these gotchas of theirs is something they can’t seem to get their heads around: it is demonstrated that Trump, for all his wealth, has far more in common with us than he does with them, and most especially, than WE do with them.

Think of it: Trump talks about women and sex in kinda vulgar terms. So do we. Trump thinks we ought to have a national border, and it ought to be properly policed. So do we. Trump thinks unfettered importation of Moslems is not only a bad idea, but a dangerous one that puts Americans at unnecessary risk, to no good purpose at all. So do we. Trump thinks that American interests ought to be the primary concern of anyone who wishes to represent us in government. So do we. Trump thinks we ought to have a strong military, and that it ought to be used judiciously but overwhelmingly when it proves necessary. So do we.

And the Establishmentarians—our Professional Politician class and the media picaroons who have attached themselves to them, remora-like and entirely unaccountable to anyone but their own kind—disagree with every one of these propositions. In fact, they not only disagree, they’re openly contemptuous of those who harbor these beliefs.

It’s to be expected from those on the Left, for whom jejune contempt of American values has always been the main motivation. But it’s disappointing, to say the very least, when we get it from people we had previously thought of as “conservative.” We see these notions as simple common sense; our ersatz allies see them as unacceptable exemplifications of our troglodytic nature…just like the fucking liberals do.

This, too, is a highly useful service Trump has done us, this revelation of the enmity and disdain these wretched betrayers harbor for us. I’d go so far as to say that if he hadn’t come along on his own it just might have been necessary to invent him, so to speak, for that purpose if for no other. It all makes Codevilla’s postulation of the divide being not between Left and Right, Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, but between Ruling Class and Country Class seem all the more prescient.

*It should be noted that, since Trump and Bush were apparently on an Access Hollywood bus arriving for a cameo on some soap opera or other, they were in what amounts to what show-biz folks call a “green room.” Which is another way of saying—you guessed it—a locker room. So now the PC police, whose team ersatz “conservatives” have so excitedly rushed to join, are now quite literally policing locker room conversations more than a decade old for unacceptable, offensive comments.

So when will Goldberg and the rest of these pissypants princesses start scolding us all about “microagressions,” “safe spaces,” and the like, I wonder?

Whether any of the innumerable slings and arrows directed at Trump’s person and politics recently have any basis in fact or not, in the end it matters quite little to me. This election, I am not so much voting for the individual as I am voting for what he inherently represents.

As so many wrongly assume, just because I vote for Trump does not necessarily require that I admire every aspect of him personally. Nor does it mean I condone every action he has committed, decision he has made, policy he has endorsed, or word he has spoken. As common sense as this may sound to some, it has tripped up enough people I have spoken to lately that sadly I feel I must make this clarification.

So why am I voting for Donald Trump?

In part I am voting for Trump because the only viable alternative, Hillary Clinton, is far worse than Trump on almost every conceivable level. At the very least, I will vote strategically for Trump in order to deny Hillary the Presidency and to prevent the catastrophe that such a result would undoubtedly bring upon our nation and possibly even the rest of the world.

However, ultimately I will vote for Trump because no matter the specifics of what actions he may take or what stances he may adopt as President, the one thing he is guaranteed to do is shake the Establishment currently embedded in our nation’s government to its very core. Given his track record so far as only just a Presidential nominee, one has to admit this to be true, just as one must equally admit that our government has fallen into a dangerous rut and must be shaken out of it.

Plenty more, all of which you should read. As for those manufactured slings and arrows, the past week or so saw a perfect storm of them unleashed:

Donald J. Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by The New York Times show.

Well, that tears it. Forget about undermining national security by maintaining an illegal, insecure e-mail server in order to keep her various corrupt and treasonous manipulations secret. Forget about her refusal to provide a US ambassador with the security he had requested and throwing four brave Americans under the bus by knowingly lying about the reason for their deaths, claiming it was because of an obscure internet video nobody had ever heard of right before she lied in the teeth of the four heroes’ bereaved families about the fiasco she and her worthless boss created. Forget about her downright comical mess of a term as SecState. Forget about her lackluster term as a carpetbagger Senator from a state she never resided in before deciding it was her easiest route back to the power she so desperately craves. Forget about her never-ending lies, her corruption, her brazen arrogance, her contempt for not just the Constitution but for Americans generally. Forget, even, the obvious collusion between Obama’s “Justice” Department, the FBI, and Clinton herself in their sham “investigation” of the whole administration’s Benghazi/e-mail malfeasance and crooked Comey’s refusal to prosecute the treasonous machinations of an entire corrupt administration for actions any or all of us would be sitting in prison right now for committing.

No, what matters here is that Donald Trump did what every single damned American does, liberal or conservative, up to and including the Clintons, the NYT, every irritating, self-righteous Hollywood blatherskite, every least liberal-fascist asswad bleating for more government as long as it affects Those People and not themselves: he used what deductions and write-offs were available to him to ensure he paid the least amount possible of confiscatory taxation to the rapaciously greedy and wholly illegitimate government of the Former United States of America, perfectly legally, without the slightest hint of malfeasance or criminal intent.

But know what the most ironic thing of all is? Trump has said all along that he’s uniquely positioned to FIX this problem, because he knows better than most how corrupt the whole process is, how easily gamed the system is, how out of whack it is from top to bottom, and how by its very nature it corrupts everything it touches, having had to work within this rotten edifice himself to achieve any kind of business success. And he’s right.

Monday’s coverage of Donald Trump’s speech to veterans is a prime illustration of a trend noticed in September by Salena Zito over at The Atlantic: Some reporters and headline writers are taking Trump’s comments very literally rather than attempting to address the substance or trying to plumb what he’s really getting at. Trump’s supporters are the exact opposite—they’re interpreting what he actually means from his rather inarticulate way of saying what he has to say. The gulf between the two cultures has inflamed the anger of Trump supporters over how the media behaves.

And honestly, with the way the media—or at least media headlines—have approached Trump’s comments on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and veterans’ health treatment, I honestly don’t blame the Trump supporters.

So there is a path of criticism of Trump here, which is—just like many things he says in his public speeches—there’s little actual content. There’s a promise that things will be better under him with no real explanation why that will actually be the case.

What is not a legitimate path of criticism is to look at the totality of these comments and suggest that Trump thinks veterans are weak or that he somehow doesn’t want to support them. And yet, that’s exactly what happened due to writers deciding to run with “some people can’t take it” and emphasize it in headlines like ‘Trump Suggests that Soldiers with PTSD Aren’t ‘Strong,'” and the even more weaselly “Trump Appears to Suggest that Veterans with PTSD Are Not ‘Strong.'” [emphasis added]

And, obviously, the Democrats are running with it, with Vice President Joe Biden responding with blustering outrage and Hillary Clinton’s Twitter feed reminding folks of previous very stupid things (but unrelated) Trump has said about veterans.

All that is to be expected, of course; the Left is going to throw everything they can possibly find at Trump to try to stop any sort of reversal of their insidious eight-year run of absolute victory, and they’re going to lie every step of the way in doing it. It’s who they are, it’s what they do, and anybody who finds any of this surprising simply hasn’t been paying attention the last few decades.

No, what’s dismaying—although it really shouldn’t be all that surprising either—is how eager people who are supposed to be more or less on the side of blocking liberalism are to jump on the bandwagon too. I read some commentary from Jonah Goldberg on this latest “controversy” a day or so ago—probably a Corner post, but I did some digging around and can’t find it now—wherein he meekly defended Trump’s remarks but then went on to complain about how that one line could be taken as offensive because he didn’t put it politely enough, and how off-putting it all was, and why can’t he just show some dignity and learn to restrain himself and stop being such an outspoken boor, and the usual blah-blah. Trouble is, here is the “problematic” statement in context:

When you talk about the mental health problems when people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of folks in this room have seen many times over, and you’re strong and you can handle it, but a lot of people can’t handle it, and they see horror stories, they see events that you couldn’t see in a movie, nobody would believe it. Now we need a mental health help and medical and it’s one of the things that I think is least addressed and it’s one of the things I hear — like your question — one of the things I hear most about when I go around and talk to the veterans.

So we’re going to have a very, very robust, very very robust level of performance having to do with mental health. We are losing so many great people that can be taken care of if they have proper care.

You know when you hear the 22 suicides a day, it’s a big part of your question, but when you hear the 22 suicides a day, that should never be. That should never be, So we’re going to be addressing that very strongly.

And the whole mental health issue is going to be a very important issue when I take over, and the VA is going to be fixed in so many ways, but that’s gonna be one of the ways we’re gonna help. And that’s in many respects going to be the number one thing we have to do because I think it’s really been left behind. Ok? Thank you very much.

Inarticulate? I’d say so, yeah. Offensive? Not at all. Insensitive to or dismissive of veterans? Quite the opposite, if you have even one honest bone in your body. What it really is is simple, realistic, and compassionate.

But here’s the thing: even allowing for any annoyance one might have at Trump’s odd stream-of-consciousness speaking style, this is about as plain-vanilla a statement in support of veterans’ health as it’s possible to make. How much more bland and anodyne would it have to be before Goldberg wouldn’t find fault with it? And does Jonah really believe that if any of us on the Right just find some way to speak our minds in a milquetoast enough way, the Left will finally decide to allow us to dissent from their totalitarian program without further harassment and attempts at suppression? Can anybody possibly believe that?

What the #NeverTrumpTards are really demanding is that Trump speak, act, and campaign more like the professional politicians they’re accustomed to and comfortable with. In other words, the reason they hate and fear Trump is exactly what so many of us like most about him. Limbaugh puts paid to the whole sordid business:

I’m sick and tired of this stuff. I’m sick of them doing it. I’m sick and tired of it working. I’m sick and tired of the media carrying the ball and running with it. I’m sick and tired of the assumption. We’ve gotten to the point where Trump was actually talking about a serious problem that not everybody faces. The idea that some people don’t face this, he is being accused of being insensitive and he’s actually talking about how the VA has let those people down and we need to have a program of improvement where we deal with this a little bit better than we have been. And the fact that they tar and feather — because any expression of not feeling compassion supposedly is going to come under assault and attack.

I’m fed up with it. I have had, like you said, 30 years we’ve been having to deal with this kind of stuff. And some days it just really irritates me. I just blow up internally and the last two days have been like that. Every instance of this stuff, from this tax return business to the illegality. You know who is actually breaking the law in this country. It’s every Democrat you can think of in this regime, at the DOJ, and Hillary Clinton and her e-mail server. Trump hasn’t broken one law yet. The media is breaking the law. Hillary is breaking the law. And we have to hear how Trump is the bad guy and Trump poses the problem. And it’s just maddening, infuriating.

There’s a whole lot of reasons people are supporting Trump. Don’t misunderstand. And one of those reasons, and it may be the reason why it doesn’t matter what Trump does with this group of people, it’s all about defeating her.

It is all about keeping her and her husband as far away from the levers of power as possible. It is all about ending this woman’s political career. There are people that are totally devoted to that concept, that premise. That’s why they’ll support Trump no matter what he does or says.

That’s one reason, yeah. There are others, but removing the Clinton cancer from the body politic for good is an excellent one, maybe the best of all.

Can no one rid me of this troublesome priest update! Oh, and then there’s this:

The conservative website True Pundit cited anonymous “State Department sources” in a report on Sunday to claim that Clinton in 2010 suggested to some staff members that the U.S. “drone” Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, whose website had embarrassed the U.S. when it published diplomatic cables, among other documents.

“Can’t we just drone this guy?” the website claimed Clinton had said.

Of course Hillary denies it in her usual specious and dishonest way, claiming it was “a joke” before going into her all too familiar “I can’t recall…” refrain. And of course Politico, being so deep in the bag for Democrat Socialists they can’t even see daylight, try their best to help her maintain that risible fiction.

But every one of you out there knows as well as I do that she said it, and that it was no joke: if she thought for one minute she could get away with it, she would happily resort to assassination—a drone strike in London, on a foreign embassy, for God’s sake—to crush any dissent or exposure of her vileness, her hapless incompetence, her outright criminality.

Complain all you like about the choices on offer this election; sniff if you will at how veddy, veddy undignified it all is, how such uncouth swine simply shan’t be allowed to ever breath the rarified air of the Oval Office. These are the choices you have, and this is the last chance you will ever get, slim though it may be, to stop them, or at least repudiate them in no uncertain terms.

#NeverTrumpTards like George Will, John Kasich, and others might think they’re protecting their privileged positions at the trough by bleating that they’re just too morally upright to lower themselves to vote for such a disgraceful swine as Trump. But they’re doing no such thing. If Hillary defrauds her way into power, all these useful idiots will have done is put themselves in the well-worn crosshairs—literally—of someone who will have no moral objection whatever to pulling the trigger on them the moment she begins to believe it will work for her rather than against her.

Our old friend Stephen Green asks a silly question in response to this non-story:

“I’m not really sure why the media keeps dropping David Duke’s name,” Pence said. “Donald Trump has denounced David Duke repeatedly, we don’t want his support and we don’t want the support of people who think like him.”

That’s fair enough, and perfectly sensible—a diffident, dismissively nonchalant response to the inevitable and tiresome liberal-media baiting of a Republican candidate. But then Stephen asks:

The Trump campaign spent all of Sunday and Monday deliberately not saying anything which would allow the press to change the subject from Hillary Clinton’s health issues.

On the other hand, who needs an invitation to call David Duke deplorable?

On the other other hand, who needs to bother about David Duke at all? Who the hell cares about him, other than Praetorian Media operatives looking to assist their swinish Party by digging up something they can unfairly tie around conservative necks? Why the hell should we be so eager to dance to their tune like good little puppets when we already know they’ll never pass up an opportunity to call us racists anyway, no matter what we say, what we do, or who we denounce?

When will we finally tire of playing a rigged game under rules we had no say in inventing, on a playing field eternally tilted to the Left—a game that we already know we can never, ever win?

David Duke represents nothing and no one of any importance at all in modern American life. In contrast, nobody bothers asking Hillary when she intends to denounce Ward Churchill, for instance, or any other of a wide, long, and deep rogue’s gallery of Marxist pseudo-intellectuals routinely treated as if they weren’t promoters of the self-same ideology responsible for the deaths of a hundred million people in the 20th century alone…and as if they weren’t staunch allies of the Democrat Socialist Party. So why on earth would anybody think it a good idea for our guy to just sit meekly back and let them dump bucket after bucket of this shit over our heads, instead of treating them with all the respect and deference they’re due—i.e., none whatsoever?